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| Saturday, March 31, 2001, Chandigarh, India   
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India’s move on Dalits faces
opposition 18 killed in plane
crash in Colorado Pakistan dismisses
India’s accusations 2 human rights
workers killed
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China opposes
Dalai Lama’s Taiwan visit USA blacklists Speight US sanctions to “hit Indian business” Riot by asylum seekers A case of cross-dressing of chromosomes 100 hospitalised after gas leak Tajikistan digs out sleeping Buddha |
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India’s move on Dalits faces opposition Geneva, March 30 While representatives of the Indian Government are in touch with commission officials to see that the Dalit issue is not included, the NGOs, in their presentations, said the world conference must address the problem of caste discrimination. India’s permanent representative at the UN Mission in Geneva, Ms Savitri Kunadi, said her government strongly opposed all such attempts which were being made to include the caste discrimination issue in the conference agenda. She said it was a “deliberate attempt by some vested interests to dilute the focus of the conference by broadening its scope to forms of discrimination not related to race.” The Indian Government’s position was also endorsed by various Dalit delegates at the current session of the commission. Ms Savitri Kumar of the Indian Council of Education said the problems of Dalits had nothing to do with institutionalised racism. These had to do only with the ineffective implementation of various constitutional, legal and administrative provisions. “Is is a battle to be fought domestically as the Dalits have been doing since Independence with a degree of success,” said Ms Kumar, granddaughter of the late Babu Jagjivan Ram. She said the caste system was not based on race.
UNI |
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18 killed in plane
crash in Colorado Denver, March 30 “The crash occurred at 7 p.m. MST (9 p.m. EST). There was no distress call to the best of our knowledge,” said Debbie Taylor at the Federal Aviation Administration office in Seattle. A dispatcher at the Pitkin County Sheriff’s office said the crash occurred near Highway 82 just outside the posh Aspen ski resort. The highway was closed and traffic diverted to nearby Snowmass Village, the residents said. Several witnesses reported that the aircraft burst into flames after it crashed about 1.6 km northwest of the Pitkin County Airport. A spokesman for Avjet Corporation of Burbank, California, said the flight originated with a crew of three in Burbank and picked up 15 passengers at Los Angeles International Airport before heading to Aspen. He declined to identify any of the aircraft’s passengers. Avjet said it had managed the Gulfstream for Airborne Charter Inc. which owned the aircraft. Two witnesses on the ground in Colorado said they saw a seat from the plane on the edge of the highway and others said they saw debris from the plane on the road. “It was very close to the road. Thank God that he did not land on the road,” Madeline Osberger, who was on the highway just after the crash, told Denver Television Station KWGN.
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Pakistan dismisses India’s accusations
Islamabad, March 30 India today claimed that Pakistan had boosted military backing to militants in Jammu and Kashmir and accused Islamabad of taking no action to create an atmosphere conducive to resume dialogue.
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Jakarta, March 30 The police confirmed the killings, but said it suspected that rebels of the Free Aceh Movement were responsible for the killings. The New York-based Human Rights Watch said the three were killed soon after leaving South Aceh police station yesterday, where one of the men, Teungku Kamal, had been summoned to answer questions over a defamation case involving police. Acehnese rights activists said Kamal was attached to Henry Dunant Centre in Switzerland, an advocacy group which has hosted talks between the government and rebels that led to a series of now frayed ceasefires. The Human Rights Watch said in a statement that Kamal was part of a team monitoring efforts to end decades of bloodshed in the province on the tip of Sumatra island. It was unclear who was responsible for the murders but the statement noted the police and military had been implicated in previous attacks on rights activists and humanitarian workers in Aceh. “The military has made it clear for some time that they want the dialogue stopped and killing members of the monitoring team is one way to do that,’’ the Human Rights Watch said. Apart from Kamal, the other men killed were Suprin Sulaiman, a human rights lawyer and driver Amiruddin. The fresh killings occurred on the same day an Acehnese activist appealed against a court’s decision to jail him for 10 months for spreading hate against the government under the Subversion laws not used since former President Suharto was in power.
Reuters |
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China opposes
Dalai Lama’s Taiwan visit Beijing, March 30 “The visit, with permission of the Taiwan authorities, will be extremely harmful to across-straits relations,” spokesman with the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council said. “The Taiwan authorities will have to take responsibility for any serious aftermath resulting from Dalai Lama’s visit,” he was quoted as saying by the state media today. Dalai Lama’s 1997 visit to Taiwan, his first ever to the island, drew strong protests from China. The Dalai Lama, “who has long been advocating Tibet’s separation from China”, had been planning to visit Taiwan from tomorrow to April 10, a media report said.
PTI |
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USA blacklists Speight Washington, March 30 “George speight and his accomplices... should not plan on travelling to the USA in the future,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, announcing the decision yesterday. The decision follows a review of the conduct of Speight and others involved in the May, 2000, coup by Secretary of State Colin Powell. “The Secretary of State has recently reviewed the conduct of Speight and those involved in the hostage-taking. They (Speight and his supporters) should understand that they can no longer travel freely to the USA”, Mr Boucher said. “Those who are not already ineligible for a US visa under our terrorist exclusion because of their role in the hostage-taking should expect their visa applications to be carefully reviewed with a presumption of denial,” he said. Speight and his supporters had stormed Parliament and held several people hostage to force the ouster of the country’s first ethnic Indian Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry. Speight is charged with treason and is awaiting trial. The decision to hold a trial for Speight and his accomplices was welcomed by Mr Boucher. “We welcome the recent statement by Fiji’s Attorney- General confirming that George Speight and his accomplices will not be pardoned, but will instead stand trial for their actions”.
PTI |
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US sanctions to “hit Indian business” Washington, March 30 If these sanctions continue “our business will definitely go to the Europeans,” Mansingh said in an interview published in the Washington Post today. He, however, said he was encouraged by comments of US Secretary of State Colin Powell during their meeting last week about a review of the sanctions. |
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Riot by asylum seekers Adelaide, March 30 Australia’s immigration department said the police was called last night to a “disturbance”at the port hedland centre in northwest australia, which houses about 400 detainees, mostly from
West Asia. “they used various items as makeshift weapons against the staff,” the spokesman told reuters. ‘’they did not take over the centre and the disturbance ended voluntarily with the detainees agreeing to return to their accommodation.’’ Australia's
policy of mandatory detention for illegal immigrants has been widely criticised by human rights groups, with cramped conditions and long periods of detention raising tension in the mostly outback camps. Some port hedland detainees were evacuated in
November when asylum seekers allegedly lit fires in the building, while rioting at another camp last year caused millions of dollars of damage and ended only after water cannons were used The immigration spokesman could not say how long the latest riot lasted, what items had been used as weapons or whether any injuries or damage were caused. He said the violence was being investigated and charges could be laid against those involved. More than 1,000 illegal immigrants have been intercepted in boats off australia so far this year, compared with just over 3,000 detained in 2000.
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A case of cross-dressing of chromosomes Washington, March 30 Surprised scientists said yesterday that nearly half of all genes related to the earliest stages of sperm production reside not on the male sex,Ychromosome, as expected, but on the X chromosome, universally considered the female sex chromosome. The finding, made by a team of researchers led by David Page of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Massachusetts, and Howard Hughes, Medical Institute, Maryland, may cause scientists to have second thoughts about the gender identity of the X chromosome. Researchers also said the finding raises the possibility that infertility due to low sperm production may be passed on to male children through their mothers, much like color-blindness or hemophilia. Researchers until now have studied only the Ychromosome in the search for the genetic underpinnings of low sperm counts. The study was published in the journal, Nature Genetics. “Scientists and non-scientists alike are comfortable thinking about the Y chromosome as a specialist in male characteristics,” Page said in a statement. “By default, we’ve traditionally thought of the X chromosome as sexually neutral or as a specialist in female characteristics. Our findings indicate that the X chromosome has a specialty in sperm production, much like the Y chromosome does.” Males have one X and one Y sex chromosome. Females have two X chromosomes, only one of which is active. Researchers were examining the genetic underpinnings of spermatogonia — stem cells in the testes that give rise to sperm. Unlike other stem cells, such as blood stem cells, which have been closely studied, sperm stem cells have remained largely unexplored. The researchers searched for genes that are active exclusively in sperm stem cells of a mice. They came up with 25 genes, including 19 new ones, that were expressed exclusively in a mouse sperm stem cells. But they were stunned by the fact that only three of them were associated with the Y chromosome and 10 were linked to the X chromosome. Page said the finding had major implications for future research. “The X chromosome is one of the most intensely studied chromosomes, and the X-linked mode of inheritance is a textbook classic — it is one of the three modes of inheritance that we study in medical genetics,’’ he said. In this mode, a genetic defect on the X chromosome may cause a disease (color blindness or hemophilia, for example). The mother, who has a defective gene on one of her two X chromosomes, is protected against the disease because women have two copies of the X chromosome, and her normal X chromosome compensates for the faulty one. Her sons have a 50 per cent chance of inheriting the defective X chromosome and having the disease. The mother’s daughters have a 50 per cent chance of inheriting the defective X chromosome and becoming carriers.
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100 hospitalised after gas leak Hanoi, March 30 The Thang Loi Frozen Food enterprise had told employees last Friday that a gas leak that hospitalised nine workers had been “successfully shut off,’’ Vietnam News reported.
DPA |
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Tajikistan digs out sleeping Buddha Islamabad, March 30 The statue, discovered by archaeologists from the erstwhile Soviet Union 35 years ago, was broken up into 100 pieces and stowed away in basement of the Dushanbe museum. The 14-metre-long Buddha was first excavated by the Soviets in 1966 from a vast Buddhist monastery complex in Ajina Tepa in southern Tajikistan, ‘The Nation’ daily said.
PTI |
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